Swords and Stopwatches
by Eduardo Ramos
Summary: Pitch discovers a new property of the Night Mares and a being he can use as a tool. Can the Guardians and some new characters defeat him?
1. Awakened

The first thing I remember, ridiculous as it was, is ash. Black ash, burnt powdery and soft, smothering my nose, mouth, and eyes. At first, it felt good; almost like one of my father's blankets. I wanted to relax, to be lulled back into sleep, into the world of not knowing.

And then I thought of Papa.

Fear, as always, drives us from our daydreaming. I shot up from the powder, coughing and blinking hard. The ash, now white, covered my burnt and grubby smock, turning their colors paler. As I stood, I looked around. I was in the remnants of some form of store, perhaps a repair shop, based on the oil stains on my dress. Through the scorched wooded beams, I saw the yellow, soothing lights of Paris I remembered from my childhood. But even those lights were smothered by the pure white crystalline light of the moon. It winked off of everything – the Seine River, the rain-slickened stone walls of Notre Dame, and store windows. And the moon itself was as white and as pure as an unused watch face, highlighted with smooth shadows like that of marble.

A gentle voice whispered in the wind, "_Welcome, Nova, daughter of Time."_

Quickly, I turned this way and that, looking for the specter that produced the voice, but there was nothing. Gradually, I thought the shadows of the moon shifted, forming a kind, if elderly, face.

"_L'Homme dans La Lune_," I whispered.

I stood there for a long time, perhaps an hour, gazing up at the celestial face, before I finally began walking out of the shop, occasionally cocking an ear to the wind in case of missed information.

I walked through the lonely city. Vaguely, I remembered my father warning me never to walk out after dark, but no one took notice of me. There was no one around that _could_ take notice of me. Once or twice a drunken man would stumble by, muttering feminine names and French cuss words, but it seemed to them that I wasn't even there. This was both a blessing and a curse. I did not know where I was going on this windy, cold night, and anyone, even a drunken man, may be able to point me in some direction.

The wind grew sharp and cold against my back. I was about to enter a shop that was somehow still open when I heard the sound of wood on a roof behind me. "Hey, kid, what are you doing out so late?"

I turned and looked up. There, silhouetted against the moon, stood a boy. His face was hidden in shadow, but I could make out the trumpet sleeves of his pirate-style shirt, the knit pattern of a ragged wool scarf, and an odd shepherd staff. His accent sounded American – the English had begun taking up a ridiculous accent, overdoing their 'o's and making their 'e's sound like 'a's. Ridiculous.

"Could you tell me where I am?" I ask in English.

I couldn't see his face, but his jaw lowered. He jumped down from the roof with impeccable balance, so graceful it was almost a dream. He stepped into the moonlight, away from the shadow of the roof, and I'm able to take in every detail. He has a crop of spiky white hair, and shock written in every detail on his now – lit face.

"You can see me?"

"Yes."

He grinned broadly, showing perfect white teeth. "You believe in me?"

"Who are you?"

The smile faded from his face.

"How can you see me if you don't know who I am?" he demanded.

"I – I don't-"

"Wait a minute." He pointed at a man staggering towards us. Other men I had seen that night have looked homely, but this one takes the cake. His thin beard sticks to several crumbs that seemed to have been adhered with blood, and his blazer and pants are stained with what appears to be tobacco juice. He reeked of liquor.

I pulled towards the boy. "I – I don't want to."

"Relax," he said grimly, grimacing. "If you're what I think you are, he can't hurt you."

I didn't understand what he meant at the time, but I braced myself and walked towards the man. As I drew closer, the scent of tobacco and general filth doubled, and I held my breath. I was so close I could have touched him, and them I take another step and –

And he stepped through me.

Imagine being shot. Or remember a time you were shot, if you are unfortunate enough to have that happen to you. A flash of pain as a projectile, so harmless when pressed against the skin, burrows through your flesh and exiting as soon as it entered. Now imagine the projectile expanding in size, so large it's the form of a man. Imagine the momentary agony that screams through your bloodstream vanishing as soon as the projectile leaves your body. Excruciating pain, then a peaceful calm, while you stagger with the idea that you cannot interact, you cannot talk, you cannot touch a mortal without hurting yourself.

I collapsed, shaking, looking up between the rapidly vanishing man and the pitiful boy. A thick, foggy had passed over the moon, and the only light illuminating his face was an ominous flickering light.

"You're a spirit now," said the boy, walking over to me with his hand outstretched.

I scuttled backwards, shrieking. No one heard me. I pressed against a cold wall, feeling the stagnant rain water soaking my smock. Tears streamed warm down my face and dropped onto my quivering hands. I did not want this boy to touch me. He would hurt me. He would hurt me.

Someone behind me pointed at the boy, and he froze. Everything froze.

I turned to my right, and saw a girl with long black hair, looking at me. She quickly wiped away my tears, smudging the soot on my face. I whimpered, but it wasn't in fear. I felt like – I felt like I knew this girl. She was older than me, around 18, and I had certainly never seen her before. I'm certain I would have remembered a girl with a wing necklace and with eyes so gold – or so sad – as this girl before.

She pulled away, tucking herself up against the wall like I was. She gripped her forearms and shivered slightly, smiling at me. I couldn't understand how she was cold. The dress she was wearing was high-quality black velvet, like she had come from a funeral.

She reached out and pressed a hand against my face, smiling slightly. Then she tucked a strand of my hair behind my hair in a quick movement, like she had done it a million times.

"_Your hair's going to get a lot longer than that_," she spoke in fluent French.

"_Yes,_" I replied. "_Hair grows._"

She laughed gently, shaking her head at the ground. The girl is silent for a while, before she looks up at me again. Her eyes were soft.

"_I have two gifts for you,_" she said, pulling out two boxes, one no larger than a book, and the other about the size of a watch box. "_They're from Père Noël._"

I opened the box gently, revealing a shiny, gold knife. From the weight of it in my hand, I could tell it was real gold. The blade itself was shaped like a butcher's knife, and the handle was patterned with tiny winged people, flying together in a diamond formation, ringed by roman numerals like a clock. It fit perfectly into my hand.

"_It grows with you,_" said the girl, looking at the blade with longing. "_It will fit in your hand until you're my age, and then it will continue working with you. It's to cut your hair with._"

I looked up at her.

"_As the Daughter of Time, you bring the New Year. Every New Year's Eve, you need to cut your hair. Never at any other time, or you could change the fate of history. Understood?_"

"_Yes._"

"_The new year, and every new day, relies on you and only you. It's a big responsibility, but I – you – will handle it quite well._"

"_Of course._"

_ "Now this one,_" she said, smirking at the box. "_This one's not mandatory, but I like it. Go on, open it up."_

Inside the box was a golden necklace like the girl had, with the wings and everything. Excitedly, I put on the necklace, only to find the chain longer than expected. It came down to the base of my ribs.

"_Yes, it is long at first,_" said the girl. "_But I kind of like it that way. Three twists to the right, then one to the left, and you'll be able to travel places faster. Be careful, though, it hurts when you first use it."_

I tucked the boxes into the pocket sewn into my skirt, grateful that the girl had made them small enough so that they fit easily.

"_And the boy, the one in the blue, won't hurt you. He's what you – what we – are now. A spirit._"

I squealed. "_I'm dead?!_"

The girl laughed, a real loud one this time. "_Yes, but you'll find it's not as bad as they make it out to be. Although it's not as good as being alive. And you have all your memories?_"

"_Well – well, _no_, actually…_"

"_It's okay,_" the girl said. "_The boy will help you get them back. Be friends with him. He'll bring you joy._" She smiled at herself, as if she had made a clever joke. "_And to unfreeze him, just point at him and think of a clock. To freeze him, just – just think of the clock falling._"

She turned to walk away, and I ran forward, grabbing the hem of her soft skirt. "_Will I ever see you again?_"

"_Yes,_" she said with finality, gripping my hand. "_I'll be with you every step of the way._"

And with that, she turned on her heel, and melted away into the night.

I returned to wear I was sitting before, careful to avoid the murky water this time. I didn't want to get my new knife wet. I pointed at the boy, and thought of a clock moving.

Nothing happened.

I pointed at him again, focusing positive energy and willpower into my movement. And yet again, nothing happened.

So, in short, I freaked. I pulled at the boy's clothes, slapped his face, even tried to soak him. It was no use. He might as well have been made of stone. Fire had stopped flickering. There was no wind, or anything that could help me. The water let me move through it, but there weren't any ripples. The water that got on my feet ran down to the ground, where they froze in place. Time had frozen. I pointed at him again and again, turning around and trying to "surprise" him into moving. It didn't work.

The moon had stopped moving. That was what I remember feeling the most guilty about. The poor moon, left alone up there in the cold sky, now frozen like the rest of us. He had brought me to life, and I had to repay him somehow. I decided to try one last time.

It wouldn't hurt the boy, or the moon, and it probably wouldn't hurt me. I pointed at him. I thought of not just one clock moving, but a whole wall of clocks. And as I thought of the clocks, I began to remember things. Time ticking orderly and neatly, like soldier's feet against pavement or the clop of a horse walking in syncopated rhythms. I thought of business men running after trains, wearing quiet pocket watches inside their jackets. I thought of the bell on the shop, once pristine and alive with feeling and the ticking of clocks, jingling with the opening of doors. I thought of life in Paris, of _my _life in Paris, and gradually everything came back to life.

The boy took another step forward before he seemed to notice I was standing with a knife. I was exhausted, wet, and bewildered. I had just brought time back. I had brought time back.

"You have a knife," he said.

I looked at the golden blade, glowing in the moonlight. "Yes."

"Where did you get it from?"

"I found it."

His lips twitched. "Don't steal things. Mortals notice them missing and then accuse people. Like this scarf," he said, poking his finger through the strands of yarn. "Stole it from a lady living alone in Ireland. Apparently it was for her husband, who was off at war. She went crazy looking for it." He looked at the scarf intently. "When he came home, I gave them the whitest Christmas Ireland has ever seen. Then I stayed away from them for the rest of the year. So he didn't need a scarf."

"That was nice of you. One time I froze humanity and brought it back."

He smiled an easy-going grin that made me both proud of myself and wanting to do more. The boy held out his hand. "My name's Jack Frost. Yours?"

I straightened up, smoothing my smock. "I'm Nova, Daughter of Time."

And although we had our differences, Jack Frost and I were always close. He told me his deepest fear; that no one would ever see him, and I told him mine; that my father would never recognize me. Yes, I met Papa later. Although his tightly-wound, creative spirit was still there, he didn't seem to be the same person inside. With his appointment to Father Time, Magnus Gautier, my loving father, lost the care that he had given me and others over the years. When I first met him, I believed he just hadn't gotten his memories back from Toothiana. As time passed, though, I realized that something had changed in him. I thought he didn't love me anymore. I thought he had given up on me.

And, as it turned out, I was quite wrong.

**And so Chapter 1 concludes. Chapter 2 should be up soon!**

**Thanks so much, and I hope you enjoy it!**


	2. Villainous Update 1

**Being the writer that I am, I was unable to think of a way to include Pitch in Nova's daily actions (****_yet_****, hehe), so I decided to give a one-page spotlight of his actions. Enjoy. (I am not evil but I tried to be)**

Pitch watched the man cry in his hanging cage. It was a pity that such a beautiful cage held such a sniffling, useless creature such as the Delivery Birdman that Pitch's horses had been able to abduct. As far as he could gather, the man had been on his way to a bar, probably to drown his fear in a pint of rum or some other foul liquor. Personally, he didn't like the stuff. He didn't drink it. In fact, he didn't need to drink or eat anything at all. It was quite a useless habit that North had gotten into.

The man began to wail, a high cry that made the Night Mares shiver with the excess fear energy they were sensing. They began to flicker between forms, changing into a beautiful, angelic woman with satiny wings or a small, blonde girl that shivered and smiled sheepishly every few seconds. Pitch hated the horses' newfound ability, but it was the key to his success. He would rise again with this new weapon in his arsenal, capturing children and their parents and replace them with the black-sand creations, leaving the originals to fend for themselves in his caverns or rot.

Eventually the man hit such a cracked, high pitch, Pitch both snapped out of his daydreams of world domination and ran out of patience. He summoned a scythe quietly and struck the cage with such force that it spiraled off into the darkness. The Birdman tumbled off his perch and lay sprawled at the bottom of the cage.

The cage went on a long arc to the far wall and came back slowly. Smoothly, Pitch reached out and caught the cage. He looked down at the man coolly, disguising his hatred and intense repulse behind a mask of suave calm.

"My dear sir, congratulations on becoming the first captured Birdman in the history of my reign."

The disgusting man sniffled and pulled back into the recesses of the cage, wings pressed against the metal. "So's long 's you let me go, Pitch,"

"Let you go? Let you _go_?!" Pitch said, and, for the first time since the Dark Ages, laughed and meant it. "No, sir, I do not intend to let you go. I intend to kill you."

"K-Kill me!" sputtered the birdman. "Why 'n blazes would you want to kill me?"

"Well, to be quite honest with you, I don't believe you get much done at home, do you?" said Pitch, still giggling.

The Birdman rose to his full height of five and a half feet. "Listen 'ere, Pitch. I got meself a daughter a' home, the one your damned horses be turnin' inta. An' I mean to protect her with my life. So's you better let me go."

"Ah. Well. Charming," said Pitch sarcastically, not letting on how much he related to the man's agony of attempting to protect his daughter. "Funny thing though, I wasn't going to bother with the girl until you brought her up."

The man staggered backwards in his cage, shocked that he had sealed his daughter's fate.

"But _now _that you've made it clear her demise would bring you nothing but grief and despair, well, then, I'll just have to kill her now. After all, who am I to not make a man's nightmares come true."

"Pitch!" screamed the man, grasping his cage. "You can't! Don' hurt her! She's just a little girl!"

Pitch snapped forward and ripped the necklace from the man's throat. "A species shifter, I see. Well. I suppose it'll work." He snapped his fingers at a Night Mare, and it shifted to a cleaner, more proper version of the imprisoned Birdman. Pitch laid the necklace across the fake man's neck, and the creature's legs disintegrated into black sand. It flew off, out of the cave, and into the dwindling sunlight of the surface world.

The Nightmare King turned slowly to face his prisoner, who stood frozen, his hands pressed against the side of the cage. In a blur of black and gray, Pitch had the man by the collar of his shirt. Leisurely, he looked upward towards a link in the chain that had broken after he had struck the cage. A single push would do the man in, send him tumbling into the darkness below, so that he would never see the light of day again.

A cold smile flickered across Pitch's lips as he thought of what awaited the man in the darkness. He took three slow steps back, and surveyed the shocked man one last time. The Night Mares, sensing his plan, edged forward eagerly, ready to ram the cage forward and into their lair.

"Goodbye," he said, and waved a careless hand, sending the man to his grave.


End file.
